THE

WRITTEN RECORDS OF THE CUMRI.

I HAVE elsewhere stated the grounds which led me to conclude, that the earliest migrations during which the dispersed inhabitants of Central Asia moved to their Western settlement, were principally conducted by sea, and not by land; and that emigrants reached Southern Spain, the British Islands, and continental shores immediately adjacent to them, at a very early period of the post diluvian world. The evidence adduced in support of my conclusions is arranged under the heads of historical records, direct or indirect, to be traced in ancient writers; of articles of commerce, such as tin and amber, peculiar to this island and to the shores of the Northern seas, and largely imported into regions bordering on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean seas, long before Greece began to write trustworthy histories; of ancient monuments of stone, found in all these islands and the adjacent maritime coasts of Western Europe, and also in all countries which are generally supposed to have been held by our ancestral or by kindred races; and, above all, of the existence of a common. language, which, though now separated and fractured into minuter parts among the various branches of the same race, still retains unmistakable marks of original identity.

More than one ancient philosopher, tempted by a specious theory founded on the supposition that human progress was liable to periodical decadence and renewal, thought that the course of the human intellect might not be inaptly illustrated by contemplating the effects produced on our earthly globe by the apparent revolutions of the heavenly bodies. The least

observant watcher of the face of nature could not fail to discover, that the electrical action of the vernal sun stimulated the genial properties inherent in the soil, and imparted life and vigour to every body capable of being quickened. That, next, the more powerful activity of the summer sun, borne, as it were, in his solstitial car, shot downward his fiery and perpendicular rays, so as to ripen and harden those cereal seeds of which the bread of man is principally composed, and caused the well-tilled fields to assume the golden hues of harvest; but that the autumnal sun, although striking the earth at the same angle and at the same distance as the vernal, exercised rather a noxious than a genial influence, and caused the vegetable world to fade away beneath his withering glance, until it apparently perishes in the icy grasp of winter-sure, however, again to revive and respond to the electric shock of returning spring.

But the comparison is better fitted to please the poetic, than to satisfy the philosophic, mind. The revolutions of the earth and the heavenly bodies are physical and regular, moving unerringly according to the laws which inexorably confine them within their several orbits. But the human intellect labours under no such physical necessity. It neither suffers periodical decay nor periodical revivals. In surveying the past history of man, we find that the activity of the mind has only continued for a brief period of the career of the early civilized races, after which it seems to suffer a complete collapse, from which many nations, once memorable, have never, as yet, recovered.

The fixed form of oriental civilization should not be regarded as the slumber consequent upon. too long continued an activity, but as the necessary sequences of cunningly devised systems excogitated by man, to enable the comparative few to keep in dull subjection the debased multitude, by fettering their minds with chains which, although secret and invisible, can never, when once made fast, be rent asunder by unaided human efforts.

In Europe, and especially among the Greek Iapetidæ, we witness, in ancient times, two periods of great intellectual activity one long anterior to history, during which was elaborated that Hellenic language which still lives in the Homeric poems as the lasting monument of the great mental powers of the race.

This first period of light closed in darkness, through which nothing reached the historic Greeks except these same poems, and the language and the literature of the wise forefathers of not altogether degenerate descendants. Out of the broken fragments and ruins of the ancient edifice arose, principally in Attica-a very narrow corner of the Hellenic world—a new form of civilization, based principally on sensual, artistical, and scientific grounds. But these admirers of beauty and art failed to realize the great truth, that the happiness of man cannot be secured on any principles which either neglect or deny his spiritual nature-the only medium through which he can become cognizant of his personal relations to his Maker, and of his duties both to Him and his fellow-creatures.

I need not say, that a civilization, thus deficient, gradually fell away from its culminating point, and finally ended in a general disbelief-first, of the popular creed; secondly, in an intellectual blindness, which prevented those visited by it from perceiving that there was a God in the creation-from being conscious that an immortal spirit dwelt in their own perishable bodies.

The non-creed of the Greek philosopher naturally caused him to shrink from those laborious duties necessarily connected with the due discharge of man's high commission, as the instrument appointed by God himself for subduing the earth, and replenishing its whole reclaimable surface with rational and responsible beings.

Degenerate Greece had, long before its downfall, ceased to send colonies into distant lands; and her footsteps in this downward career had been faithfully followed by Imperial Rome, who, under her military despots, withered from the

roots all the hardihood, the stern energies, and laborious perseverance of the primitive Sabino-Roman.

A far different spirit seems to have prevailed in the earlier ages among those nations who rushed from their Eastern homes to occupy the swamps, marshes, and forests of the European world, and to prepare them to become fit habitations of civilized man. For we learn from undoubted sources of information, that the first recorders of events who visited these our Western Isles, found the inhabitants completely furnished with all the animals, vegetables, minerals, and implements, necessary for the maintenance of civilization, and which failed to move further west for more than three thousand years.

Old Homer, ages before the philosophers of Greece suggested infanticide and libertinage as wise checks upon a surplus population, had sung of lands untilled by the hand and untrodden by the foot of man, which required nothing but human labour to change them from howling wildernesses into smiling gardens.

Such a land was thus described by him :

"In front was a low island. It was woody and furnished food to goats untamed by man. These are not disturbed by him, nor are they visited by hunters, who undergo great hardships while making their way through deep forests or laboriously climbing over mountain ranges. Nor do sheep and kine frequent it, nor has it been ploughed, but has always remained untilled and unsown: unvisited by man, it furnishes food only to bleating goats. For the Kuklopes, who inhabit the nearest land, have no ships nor shipwrights able to construct serviceable vessels, fit to convey the produce of their land to the cities of the world: produce of various kinds, which men by means of sea-traversing ships mutually exchange with each other. Were men of this character to discover the island, they would soon colonize it and cultivate the ground. For the soil is fruitful, and would bear all fruits in their seasons. For along the shores of the foaming sea lie strips of land, flat and well watered. And here the vine would flourish; and here is arable ground from which, in due season, heavy crops might be raised, because the mould is deep. There is, also, a safe harbour, where a ship might ride securely without casting anchor or fastening a cable to the shore. There, sailors, having touched, might wait their own leisure, or until a favourable breeze invited them to set sail. At the upper end of the harbour flows a stream of pure water, springing in a rocky cavern overgrown by trees."

This description of a fruitful island, not inhabited by man, shows that Homer believed that in the time of the Trojan war there may have been many such spots in the far-west unoccupied by man.

One of the islands in the Atlantic, visited by the Carthaginians about the middle of the fifth century before Christ, is described by Avienus, in his account of their voyage, as being tenanted by goats alone; while the beautiful Madeira lay undiscovered, or at least uninhabited, by man until the period of the Portuguese voyages in rather recent times.

But our islands, even long before the Trojan war, had been visited and colonized by men who had reached them in seatraversing ships, had colonized them, and imported from the East the sheep, the kine, the horse, the plough with its accompaniments, and all the material aids which the emigrants had inherited from their Caucasian forefathers, and also, as I firmly believe, the Cadmean alphabet, consisting of only eighteen letters, being the very same as the ancient British and Irish elementary characters.

But the Druids, unlike the hereditary priest castes of the Eastern world, owed their sacro-sanct character, not to blood and race, but to a long-continued course of instruction, from which they were supposed to emerge a wiser, more sober, a better informed, and a more learned class, than any other portion of the community.

A course of studies similar to those described by me in a preceding paper, must have been based on documents accessible, perhaps, only to a few, but written either in cryptic characters, or in those which were commonly used for commercial purposes, and carrying on the ordinary business of human life.

We are expressly told by Julius Cæsar, that the Gallic disciples, who wished to finish their studies in Druidic lore, resorted for that purpose to Great Britain, where, as he was informed, this hierarchal institute originated. Traditions concerning the origin of the nation, and of their forefathers,